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Obama: No charges for harsh CIA interrogation

President Barack Obama absolved CIA officers
from prosecution for harsh, painful interrogation of terror
suspects Thursday, even as his administration released Bush-era
memos graphically detailing - and authorizing - such grim tactics
as slamming detainees against walls, waterboarding them and keeping
them naked and cold for long periods.

Human rights groups and many Obama officials have condemned such
methods as torture. Bush officials have vigorously disagreed.

In releasing the documents, the most comprehensive accounting
yet of interrogation methods that were among the Bush
administrations most closely guarded secrets, Obama said he wanted
to move beyond "a dark and painful chapter in our history."

Past and present CIA officials had unsuccessfully pressed for
more parts of the four legal memos to be kept secret, and some
critics argued the release would make the United States less safe.

Michael Hayden, who led the CIA under George W. Bush, said CIA
officers will now be more timid and allies will be more reluctant
to share sensitive intelligence.

"If you want an intelligence service to work for you, they
always work on the edge. That's just where they work," Hayden
said. Now, he argued, foreign partners will be less likely to
cooperate with the CIA because the release shows they "can't keep
anything secret."

On the other side, human rights advocates argued that Obama
should not have assured the CIA that officers who conducted
interrogations would not be prosecuted if they used methods
authorized by Bush lawyers in the memos.

Obama disagreed, saying in a statement, "Nothing will be gained
by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."

The Bush administration memos describe the tough interrogation
methods used against 28 terror suspects, the fullest and now
complete government accounting of the techniques. They range from
waterboarding - simulated drowning - to using a plastic neck collar
to slam detainees into walls.

Other methods were more psychological than violent. One
technique approved but never used involved putting a detainee who
had shown a fear of insects into a box filled with caterpillars.

The documents also offer justification for using the tough
tactics.

A May 30, 2005, memo says that before the harsher methods were
used on top al-Qaida detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he refused to
answer questions about pending plots against the United States.

"Soon, you will know," he told them, according to the memo.

It says the interrogations later extracted details of a plot
called the "second wave" to use East Asian operatives to crash a
hijacked airliner into a building in Los Angeles.

Terror plots that were disrupted, the memos say, include the
alleged effort by Jose Padilla to detonate a "dirty bomb"
spreading nuclear radiation.

Even as they exposed new details of the interrogation program,
Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, offered the first
definitive assurance that the CIA officials who were involved are
in the clear, as long as their actions were in line with the legal
advice at the time.

Holder went further, telling the CIA the government would
provide free legal representation to its employees in any legal
proceeding or congressional investigation related to the program
and would repay any financial judgment.

"It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women
working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in
advance by the Justice Department," Holder said.

Obama said in his statement and a separate letter sent directly
to CIA employees that the nation must protect their identity "as
vigilantly as they protect our security."
Current CIA Director Leon Panetta said in a message to his
employees: "CIA responded, as duty requires."

Some parts of the memos were blacked out, and Panetta had pushed
for more redactions, according to a government official who
declined to be named because he was not authorized to release the
information.

The CIA has acknowledged using waterboarding on three high-level
terror detainees in 2002 and 2003, with the authorization of the
White House and the Justice Department. Hayden said waterboarding
has not been used since, but some human rights groups have urged
Obama to hold CIA employees accountable for what they, and many
Obama officials, say was torture.

The memos produced by the Justice Department's Office of Legal
Counsel in 2002 and 2005 were released to meet a court-approved
deadline in a lawsuit against the government in New York by the
American Civil Liberties Union.

"It's impossible not to be shocked by the contents of these
memos," said ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer. "The memos should never
have been written, but we're pleased the new administration has
made them public."

In addition to detailing individual techniques, one memo also
specifically authorized a method for combining multiple methods, a
practice human rights advocates argue crosses the line into torture even if any individual methods does not.

The methods authorized in the memos include keeping detainees
naked, keeping them in painful standing positions and keeping their
cells cold for long periods of time. Other techniques include
depriving them of solid food and even beating and kicking them.
Sleep deprivation, prolonged shackling and threats to a detainee's
family were also used.

Interrogators were told not to allow a prisoner's body
temperature or food intake to fall below a certain level, because
either could cause permanent damage, said senior administration
officials.

The Obama administration last month released nine legal memos
from the Bush administration. It probably will release more as the
ACLU lawsuit proceeds, the officials said.

The lawsuit has sought to use the Freedom of Information Act to
shed light on the treatment of prisoners - though the Bush
administration eventually abandoned many of the legal conclusions
put forth in the memos and the Obama administration has gone
further to actively dismantle much of President Bush's anti-terror
program.

Obama has ordered the CIA's secret overseas prisons known as
"black sites" closed and has ended "extraordinary renditions"
of terrorism suspects to other countries if there is any reason to
believe those countries would torture them. He has also restricted
CIA questioning to methods and protocols approved for use by the
U.S. military until a complete review of the program is conducted.

Also on Thursday, Holder formally revoked every legal opinion or
memo issued during Bush's presidency that justified interrogation
programs.

The documents have been the subject of a long, fierce debate
inside and outside government over how much should be revealed
about the previous administration's approach.

In his statement, Obama said he was reassured about the
potential national security implications by the fact that much of
the information contained had already been widely publicized -
including some of it by Bush himself - and by the fact that the
program no longer exists as it did.

Withholding the memos, Obama argued, would only serve to deny
facts already in the public domain.

"This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past,
and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken
by the United States," the president said.

Those assurances are not likely to inoculate Obama against
criticism from conservatives. Last month, former Vice President
Dick Cheney said that Obama's decisions to revoke Bush-era
terrorist detainee policies will "raise the risk to the American
people of another attack."